For the historic opponent, today supported by the outgoing Head of State, the presidential election is the election of the last chance.
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Will the fifth candidacy be the right one? Raila Odonga has reason to believe it. At 77, the veteran of Kenyan politics addresses the presidential election, this Tuesday, August 9, in the position of favorite. Not only do the polls place him a few points in front of his competitor, the vice-president William Ruto. But “Baba”, as his fellow citizens call him, has the support of the outgoing Head of State, Uhuru Kenyatta, and his influence within Nairobi’s institutions and business circles.
The eternal opponent, who spent nine years in detention following a missed coup in 1982, has a revenge to take. A candidate in 2007, he saw his victory stolen following electoral manipulations. Fraud had led to the renewal of President Mwai Kibaki and plunged the Kenya into a bloodbath. Ten years later, it was the Supreme Court, seized by the candidate Odenga, who canceled the election.
“Thank you for always being held by my side during the long years of struggle for the release of Kenya. The path was long,” conceded the eternal candidate on Saturday August 6, during his last meeting in the Kasarani stadium Nairobi, mythical place of Kenyan politics during the past decades.
Raila will he succeed where her father, Oginga Odinga, had failed? The first vice-president of independent Kenya had seen his ambitions trampled on by the president of the time, Jomo Kenyatta. Nose to history, it is today the son of the former head of state who serves as a presidential springboard for the hereditary opponent. A Byzantine alliance between two sometimes allied men, often ferocious rival.
glass ceiling
The base of Raila Odonga understood this: 2022 presents itself both as its best and its last chance. Hope is immense among its supporters, at the forefront of which we find “its” community, the approximately 6 million luo (around 12 % of the population), present en masse, especially in very politicized nairobi slums, and on The banks of Lake Victoria.
“The time has come, it is finally up to us to direct”, sums up Caroline Atieno, the feet immersed in a hot water bassine from her beauty salon in downtown Kisumu. The port city of western Kenya and its million inhabitants constitute the bastion of Raila Odonga, the Mzee (“patriarch”) of the Luo. For decades, the province has been consumed marginalized by the central authorities of Nairobi.
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